Chastity, virginity, honor and pride in decision-making

I’ll take a different path: experience numbs. The more you have a certain experience, the more you are dulled to it. This is the real reason most people loathe office work; it’s not so much boring in itself, but the repetition and lack of change and lacking of possible changed outcome is soul-crushing.

It’s the same way when you go to a party. You may remember the first ten names, but after that, you’re awash in so many similar memories that it all runs together. Soon you are numb to new names...Sex is the same way. You can view it as an experience, in which the context defines its meaning, or you can treat it as a commodity, where more (and more convenient) is better.

Probably not a popular topic, even here, but someone had to say it: virginity/chastity rock. Making difficult choices in life rocks. If you are a man who lives his whole life having loved, married and bed one woman, you've beat everyone else to a realm of true clarity and happiness.

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Phoenix

How the hell does sleeping with more than one woman your whole life negatively impact on the clarity and happiness of your overall state of awareness? Because the bible says so? I fail to see any tangible links, and as you said yourself it might not be a popular statement to make on this forum, so if you could at least offer some reasoning for the assertion I would be most obliged.

I fail to see any tangible links, and as you said yourself it might not be a popular statement to make on this forum, so if you could at least offer some reasoning for the assertion I would be most obliged.

Did you read the article? I thought DMBM made it pretty clear he was referring to the article and the arguments made therein.

Not everything needs quantifiable proof, and this is one such domain. It's more of an ideal or virtue that guides the behaviour and at the same time get beyond yourself as the the highest value (not applicable to neo-autists). I personally think with true dedication and a bit of insight into compatibility there will never be the need to part. Sometimes things honestly don't work out, and that's fine, but the thinking is still lightyears away from the casual sex attitudes which evolved out of the hippy era.

When experiences lose their luster we lose our ability to place value in them.

Overindulgence is the quickest way to passive nihilism because it is the quickest method of stripping something down to it's unfulfilling essence. Anything positive that could have been derived from the experience becomes harder and harder to identify the more it becomes a means to pleasure and less to anything .

I was disciplined by my family and the church I grew up in to see chastity as a crucial means of avoiding the "wide gate and broad road that leads to destruction". It was a good lesson that I'm glad I was subject to, despite some of the techniques used for teaching it.

Does excess pleasure cause inactivity, or does inactivity result in a pursuit of pleasure, or does some third factor rule over them both?

Either way, our goal here - the goal of not only all humans, but all life, perhaps down to the atom - is in seeking a full experience of existence. This noted "Hedonistic" behaviour is a running away from pain as much as a running towards pleasure. However, it is a movement in the opposite direction from breaking the cycle of inactivity, of lifelessness. What we need is movement to the side of Life and Death, not non-Life.

I can respect the values of being chaste, as it is indeed a noble endeavor.

For myself, I guess I'm more in touch with my animalistic side, because I do like spreading my seed. I should add that contraceptives are incredibly important in this regard, as well as not fucking the first person you find. It is more rewarding to me to find a woman who I respect and then have sex with her; in this way my perception of women is not dulled down to the point of viewing them as walking vaginas.

I should also say that this is purely my worldview, and I don't expect most ANUSians to agree with it.

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Phoenix

Actually no. When he quoted the article as saying at the beginning "I'll take a different path: Experience numbs" I thought the word "experience" was used as a verb, encouraging us to experience numbness to become numb to numbness itself in a sort of transcendent nihilistic vein. Then I thought he added an off the cuff comment of his own about chastity after quoting the article. I thought the idea of numbness towards numbness was interesting, and more on the level of quality I come to expect from his posts, I just never assumed he would post an article advocating chastity... *grumbles* Also I noted the article URL was www.groin.com, and I'm still trying to recover from that tragic day I went on to a certain URL www.anus.com.

Does excess pleasure cause inactivity, or does inactivity result in a pursuit of pleasure, or does some third factor rule over them both?

I think this is a false question, because it demonizes "pleasure" and replaces it with concepts such as "responsibility", "purity", "morality", etc. The fact is that "excess pleasure" refers to that which has ceased to be pleasurable, so it really isn't pleasure at all, it's not as if pleasure took a wrong turn late at night on Los Angeles blvd and got into the ol cycle from one of those 'gateway drugs'.

Either way, our goal here - the goal of not only all humans, but all life, perhaps down to the atom - is in seeking a full experience of existence. This noted "Hedonistic" behaviour is a running away from pain as much as a running towards pleasure. However, it is a movement in the opposite direction from breaking the cycle of inactivity, of lifelessness. What we need is movement to the side of Life and Death, not non-Life.

In my view the problem with your thinking - or with how you're expressing / interpreting you thinking - is that on one hand you acknowledge we all seek a full experience of existence, but on the other you acknowledge the hedonistic imperative is flawed, therefore I can only conclude you're saying that part of having a full life experience is the pursuit and acquisition of displeasure?

I believe in an afterlife (not ala Chrstianity), so I recognize the importance of making certain preparations for after you die by developing certain knowledge and skills in life. What really irks me though is when people say the pursuit of happiness must be diverted in order to make room for the pursuit of certain knowledge and skills or the pursuit of other qualities or characteristics to your person, without clearly elaborating what makes these additional goals worth pursuing over happiness.

When experiences lose their luster we lose our ability to place value in them.

Overindulgence is the quickest way to passive nihilism because it is the quickest method of stripping something down to it's unfulfilling essence. Anything positive that could have been derived from the experience becomes harder and harder to identify. Your behavior then becomes much like a parasite. You eventually give up on the search, toss the depleted activity over your shoulder like a piece of trash, and move on to your next victim.

I was disciplined by my family and the church I grew up in to see chastity as a crucial means of avoiding the "wide gate and broad road that leads to destruction". It was a good lesson that I'm glad I was subject to, despite some of the techniques used for teaching it.

In my view, novelty is a cheap thrill. Perhaps for more right-hand path individuals there is something to be said for every day 'being a new day' as they say, I"ll have to give that some thought. It's true there's something called addiction or obsession, when you get distracted from your state of awareness, usually to maintain suppression and denial of difficult life events, by overly-attaching yourself to certain ideas / activities. And it's true an important distinction should be made between the superficiality of novelty and the profound reverence expressed in the adage of living each day like it were your last. But you can never tell the future, sometimes you have to do mundane work in modern society, but always you can find peacefulness in inner stillness and silence. When asked, by the way, what is the happiest time ever in his life, the Dalai Lama responded "right now".

Chastity can be deemed absurd and pointless only in the context of a society which canonises sex and prizes it as a holy experience, namely our own. Yet, when looking at the facts (i.e. experience), abstinence from sex can give immediate personal benefits, and this anyone can prove empirically. I do a lot of intellectual work, and I have proved in myself how beneficial abstinence can be. After >14 days of withdrawal from all sexual activities, my nerves take only a few minutes to recover themselves even after a whole day of intense mental activity, while a day after sex my nerves can be wrecked for hours if I strain them only for a while. Of course, other factors have their influence as well, like diet, exercise, and sleep.

Sex may be, indeed, a delightful activity in itself, but whoever trades that pleasure in a regular basis for long-term health, activity and well-being, wins a gold mine. This has nothing to do with society and religion. It's the way we humans are made.

When you enter an intense situation, it's like a scavenger hunt with raised stakes where you are locked in a catacomb and you have to use your wits to find the key. It becomes very easy to get tunnel vision, the focal point being an emotion or a wasteful or lopsided strategy. This is where chastity/morbidity come in handy. They calm your nerves and allow you to focus on the big picture, and if you practiced them consistently prior to the intense situation, you will be more prepared for the deadly cold that seeks to freeze you from inside. Once you find the key and reach the surface, he who is able to adapt to the relief gracefully, without falling to his knees and shedding tears, will be the least affected by the subsequent disillusionment after the luster wears off.

I read an interesting idea from Medieval philosophy today, that basically said that all things seek union with God, for God is the source of all that is Good. However, many confuse the Goodness which stems from God as the source of its own Goodness, and so pursue instances of the good rather than the source of the Good in God.

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... but 'the rational creature ... has been so made that it cannot itself be the good by which it is made happy' ... 'it is not the virtue of they soul that maketh thee happy, but He who hath given thee the virtue, who hath inspired thee to will, and hath given thee the power to do'

-- F. Copleston, on the moral theory of St. Augustine

I believe life is to be lived to its fullest, and that all things seek to live life to its fullest, but that life is only to be found through its pure state, of Good for the sake of Good. When we pursue manifestations of the Good, then it will decay, at a rate depending on the levels of its universality. The notion that a pure Good may be extracted and brought back to a single source is perhaps implicit to the notion of a perfect God.

I believe furthermore that the notion of infinite life of your soul should bear the same implications when properly understood as does the notion of living in the moment, i.e. that the moral theory which addresses ethical concerns at the differential level is consistent with a certain moral theory taken over the entirety of existence.

i.e. In their complete forms, the ideal moral theory of the proper direction of action in the moment gives the same set of outcomes as does the moral theory which extends the action through any further level of time or space. Actually, the claim is not that this is the nature of morals, but that this can validly be given as a structure of morality, i.e. as a guide for direction of action taken in a closed system based on effects to the system as a whole.

Thus, the suitably rational egocentric agent for example should come to the same conclusion as the efficient Hedonist, or the sufficiently knowledgeable Utilitarian, or the worshippers of God or Satan, should all come to the same conclusions with regards to morality, when taken to their limits.

Implications for thread topic: when acting in accordance with goodness, all of your faculties will inform you of the same path, i.e. the path of perfect good. Thus, when one part of you pulls you in one direction, and another part in the other direction, there is something not good about the situation. Either this is a flaw in the external situation, in your internal processing, or in the alignment between the two. That is, it will be a result of lack of justice in the individual, or lack of justice in the system within which the individual is an actor.

I do a lot of intellectual work, and I have proved in myself how beneficial abstinence can be. After >14 days of withdrawal from all sexual activities, my nerves take only a few minutes to recover themselves even after a whole day of intense mental activity, while a day after sex my nerves can be wrecked for hours if I strain them only for a while.

Although this seems like quite an exaggeration to me, I certainly agree in essence that sex can significantly drain your energy and that abstinence can build it up. Although it's important to qualify this statement, as there are different types of sex, for example properly-performed tantric sex doesn't drain your energy to the contrary it's all about building energy up. Also I think there's something to be said for periodically cycling from high-energy levels to low-energy levels, as a sort of routine for living in modern society, if your evolutionary modality (like my left-leaning one) is for instance particularly rebellious or defiant and poorly compatible with the modern world; as the adage goes it's not a symptom of mental health to be well-adjusted to an insane society, and as much as tantra is a very fine art I'd argue it's a skill to ride some lower-level righteous indignation now and then.

Although this seems like quite an exaggeration to me, I certainly agree in essence that sex can significantly drain your energy and that abstinence can build it up. Although it's important to qualify this statement, as there are different types of sex, for example properly-performed tantric sex doesn't drain your energy to the contrary it's all about building energy up. Also I think there's something to be said for periodically cycling from high-energy levels to low-energy levels, as a sort of routine for living in modern society, if your evolutionary modality (like my left-leaning one) is for instance particularly rebellious or defiant and poorly compatible with the modern world; as the adage goes it's not a symptom of mental health to be well-adjusted to an insane society, and as much as tantra is a very fine art I'd argue it's a skill to ride some lower-level righteous indignation now and then.

It was not an exaggeration, believe me. The amount of energy that is concentrated in the sexual impulse is astonishing, and could be channelled with some effort into other purposes. It seems counter-intuitive, I know, seeing that this power is contained in just a small volume of semen.

I heard much about tantra, but most of it seem like bollocks to me. All pleasures in life have their quid pro quo, and I don't see sex as an exception. For me, the only properly performed sex is that which gives great satisfaction to both parts, but if abused, the consequences must still be faced.

I used to be rebellious, but then I realised that modern society, save externals, is not much different from all the others that preceded it. Seeing that I was not in a dead-end calmed me a bit, and got me focused on my goals.

Perhaps it would be simpler to say short-term sacrifice affords long-term pleasure, and that this is experientially verifiable?

But what are the complete implications of this? This is, after all, a simplified version of one of the most important principles in all of existence. Basically, it is a statement about the Hedonic Calculus, i.e. the determination of the overall Goodness of an action by taking a sum of its Goodness over a certain period of time.

By using such models to represent Goodness, then we would have a mathematical, and thus potentially scientific, account for True morality on experiential grounds.

Also, a principle that I brought up: that at the morally optimal state of being of some subset of experience, any moral state of a subset of this will not be in disagreement.

e.g. in the morally optimal state, no individual in the state will disagree with the overall ways of society. Society, and any lower level of society, will reflect the individual's own desire, not because one has caused the other, but because the conditions have become just right so that the Will of each individual and the Will of all align.